Thinking outside the cube

A familiar bell indicated that I had a text message, and I picked up my cellphone.

My son, using the group message he or his sister had set up for our family, had sent a photograph.

Straight from his cubicle at his new job at a publishing company in New York City, it showed a framed picture of a duck, wearing spectacles and a suit and tie, hanging on the wall above his computer screen.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Nice,” I answered.

“Thanks.”

Another photograph, sent a few minutes later, showed a cardboard backboard set up above a trash can just beyond his filing cabinet.

“Busy today?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. I’ve done seven minutes of work already.”

It was 12:30 p.m.

“Funny,” I texted back.

As he adjusts to living in the 9-to-5 world, my son is doing his best to shake things up, trying to introduce a bit of levity into the rabbit-warren world of hallways and water coolers, elevators and uniform desks.

He’s not too far away from living life semester by semester, and he is finding it a little difficult to switch over to time clocks and lunch hours.

Every so often, just because I am his mother, I have to ask the question I’ve asked for the past two decades, every time he veers off track from whatever he is supposed to be doing, whether it’s calculus homework or emails for his boss.

“You’re getting your work done, right?”

He is, of course. He works hard, and fast enough to allow for time to worry about whether his co-workers know how to respond to a good joke.

Meanwhile, he is busy figuring out interesting colors of pants to wear every day.

He has already determined that Tuesday is Yellow Pants Day. Every Tuesday, he shows up in a pair of mustard colored pants that must clash not only with the office décor but also with the standard interpretation of business attire.

Thankfully, the office dress code is already pretty relaxed, leaving plenty of tolerance for his shenanigans.

In a quick weekend trip home two weeks ago, he told me that he was trying to choose between Nantucket Red, teal and a royal blue for an additional colored pants day.

He showed his sister the choices, and she gave him her usual direct answer.

“You are out of your mind.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll go with the teal.”

Of course, he spends plenty of time goofing around on his own time, too, and sometimes the goofing around actually has some point to it.

A couple of weeks ago, he stayed at his desk three hours after work ended for the day, designing mock titles to post on a board next to his boss’s office.

By the time he finally went home, he had sent me two alternate color schemes for his favorite one:

“Lucky Number 9: the Presidency of William Henry Harrison.”

Harrison, you might remember, was our ninth president, the poor guy who caught pneumonia at his inauguration and died a few weeks later.

The author of my son’s fake book?

John Tyler, Harrison’s vice president and naturally the 10th president.

“I’ve acquired a few titles,” he told his boss the next morning, when she came in for the day.

She looked at the board, his mock covers carefully posted right next to the real titles he had designed the previous week.

And she burst into laughter.

Thank goodness.

It will be interesting to see what happens as he continues in the workaday world. Will he stay in the mainstream, becoming more and more interested in the company he works for now and following the industry trajectory for his current job?

Or will he end up doing something completely different, out of the office, out of the city, out of the country?

At this point, it’s impossible to predict.

But I do know that he’s come up with a few new ways to decorate his cubicle.

Last I heard, he had ordered a welcome mat and a mailbox.

“What’s next?” I asked him the other day.

“I’m thinking about a set of wind chimes.”

“But you’re in a cubicle. They won’t ever chime,” I pointed out.

“Well, I guess I’ll need to order a rotating fan, too.”

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